I posted this on windower forums where it's probably more suited, but BG gets a much larger amount of the playerbase passing through, and i'm putting it here in the hope someone who browses here and not there has had the same problem and can provide a solution!
I recently bought a new 32b vista laptop, a HP DV2799. Whenever i log into FFXI, in any zone with more than 2-3 people or mobs my FPs drops to at most 10, and in whitegate, aery, or similar zones im getting 2-3
Rough Spec is a 2.5ghz core2duo, 4gb of ram and what's probably causing the problem; a nvidia 8400M GS graphics card. I know this is theoretically easily powerful enough to play ffxi on the highest settings with the registry mods, because my old PC (which i still use) is a much lower spec, and can run ffxi with all that stuff going on.
I tried looking for driver updates, but apparently nvidia doesn't provide drivers for it's mobile range of "graphics solutions" (i'm not clued up enough to know whether mine is a card or an onboard something or other). HP themselves only seem to provide drivers from mid 2007, which is assumably far too long ago to be of any use, as my laptop should have at least them.
When i first got the laptop i had a problem with ffxi crashing on load, which was fixed by uninstalling the silly HP quickplay buttons. Don't know if this makes a difference, so i figured i should add it in.
Any new solutions that have worked for anyone, or any new ideas at all would be incredibly appreciated! even old ideas that i may have missed thanks guys!